Human-induced climate change and universal human rights are two
intimately connected issues that highlight cognitive dissonances in
contemporary scientific and moral/theological discourses. How remarkable
that in an age of science and technology in the postChristian West,
scientific consensus on climate change is called into question, while at
the same time it is an almost unquestioned tenet of twenty-first century
faith that all humans are morally equal. Political correctness,
self-interest, as well as politics and a smattering of philosophy have
turned post-Enlightenment rationality on its head to fuel a debate about
whether to trust the judgement of science, while there is little dissent
directed at those who proclaim the universal truth of inalienable human
rights. In its reaction to the flaws and optimism of post-Enlightenment
ultra-rationalism, Western thinking finds itself in a postmodern muddle.

This essay concerns the pragmatic necessity of a realist position
in both science and morality. It then points to a way forward that is
both sensitive to the patent philosophical problems of making universal
knowledge claims, and grounded in the pragmatics of human existence at a
crucial historical moment. The task is pressing and the conversation is
necessarily a global one; as the calendar counts down the remaining
decades of Western power, creation's clock too is ticking. Climate
change and human rights are paradigm cases and critical examples in the
race to find common accord. In both cases a viable human future requires
that we, as a species, come to agreement, but neither post-Cartesian
rationalism nor postmodern sophistry offers a viable way forward: the
first is bankrupt, the second loudly proclaims its lack of realist
pretensions. Neither offers reasons for believing what Western common
sense, rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition, holds to be true: that
science is a trustworthy guide to the natural world, and that morally we
stand under an obligation to feed the poor, to care for the planet and
to respect the equal dignity of all human beings. The universal nature
of these claims, held dear in the Western tradition and rooted in a
trans-human reality, is in doubt, and with it the possibility of global
conversation and action.

This essay draws on the work of three 'big-picture'
philosophers, all concerned with what one of them (borrowing from
Michael Oakeshott) calls 'the conversation of mankind'. (2) I
focus on the 'epistemological behaviorism' of North American
pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty, who encapsulates the postmodern in
his nonchalant setting aside of philosophical discussion about
'reality and the world and truth', (3) and who argues that
philosophy, understood as the two-thousand-year history of trying to
find grounds for truth and knowledge, has lost its way in fruitless
debate that does little to promote the human conversation. After a
critique of Rorty, I briefly suggest that a more nuanced alternative,
which I call fiduciary hermeneutic fallibilism, might be drawn from an
amalgam of the work of Hungarian scientist and philosopher Michael
Polanyi with that of German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer. They, like
Rorty, recognise difficulties inherent in philosophy after Descartes.
Nevertheless, they both argue for the possibility of robust truth, of
credible but fallible claims to knowledge, and for the possibility of
action--scientific and moral--despite debate about the ultimate
justification of our beliefs.

In this essay I take realism (in science or morality) to be the
view that at least some objects of human judgements are independent of
human beliefs. And, unless otherwise qualified, I take objectivism to be
the epistemological position that holds that those judgements are true
or false in a universal, trans-historic sense, independent of beliefs or
epistemic practices. But neither realism nor objectivism entails either
that we are able to specify with certainty which of our judgements are
true or what it is about the world that makes them so. At face value the
claim that all human beings have inalienable rights appears to be
reporting a universal (moral) fact in the same way that the claim that
human-induced global warming is occurring appears to be reporting a
universal scientific fact. While neither claim is indubitable, they are
both stated in a way that does not admit of relativisation: in both
cases the claims are apparently either universally true or they are
false. Richard Rorty disagrees.

RICHARD RORTY'S 'EPISTEMOLOGICAL BEHAVIORISM'

Richard Rorty (1931-2007) is perhaps the most respected proponent
of pragmatist philosophy since John Dewey. He responds to the
intractable and traditional philosophical problems associated with
defining and grasping truth and reality by turning away from that
project to adopt a 'community-based understanding of truth',
(4) and by proposing a role for philosophy characterised by imaginative
rhetoric rather than rigour. (5) According to Rorty, for two millennia
philosophy has lost its way in a fruitless discussion that does little
to promote the 'conversation of mankind'. In his inimitable
style, he challenges philosophy's quest for epistemic security,
'driven by the need to find something to be apodictic about'.
(6) In this outline I quote Rorty extensively in order to convey
something of his ironic and insouciant style.

Rorty adopts and adapts the pragmatism of William James and John
Dewey in his agenda for a 'liberal utopia' to reform both
philosophy and society, and to protect the best of Western liberalism.
(7) For Rorty, traditional philosophy is unnecessary baggage on this
journey, based as it is on confused notions about the nature of reality
'in itself' and the futile pursuit of apodictic truth based on
a representationalist epistemology. Rorty's project is explicitly
ethnocentric, as he recognises, but in the absence of universal
adjudicating standards beyond human consensus, the choice for the
philosopher and thinker is either to contribute constructively to the
debate or to bunker down in fruitless philosophical disputes. So Rorty
is a self-described liberal ironist: liberal because 'liberals are
people who think that cruelty is the worst thing we do'; (8) and
ironist because ironists know that their 'final vocabulary' is
contingent and not dictated by the nature of the world or by a human
essence. Ironists also recognise their precarious social position;
'The opposite of irony is common sense', (9) he says.

According to Rorty, philosophy lost its way by accepting an
incoherent model that postulates representations in the mind of a world
external to the mind. (10) On this view, truth lies in a correct
'correspondence' between the so-called 'real' world
and the representation which is reflected in the mirror of the mind and
which is immediately present to consciousness: 'the picture which
holds traditional philosophy captive is that of the mind as a great
mirror, containing various representations--some accurate, some not--and
capable of being studied by pure, nonempirical methods'. (11)
Rorty's principal argument against traditional understandings of
truth is found in his criticism of the 'appearance--reality
distinction': if truth lies in the correspondence between how the
world appears (expressed through human sentences or propositions) in
contrast to reality or the world 'in itself', then, says
Rorty, such a notion is meaningless, because 'we have no idea what
"in itself" is supposed to mean'. (12) Despite our
familiarity with such a way of speaking, we can make no sense of a
'world in itself' that is not always and already a product of
our cultural and linguistic practices: 'there are many ways to talk
about what is going on, and ... none of them gets closer to the way
things are in themselves than any other'. (13) So, Rorty claims,
highlighting his pragmatic position, 'the notion of "accurate
representation" is simply an automatic and empty compliment which
we pay to those beliefs which are successful in helping us do what we
want to do'. (14) In fact, 'we understand knowledge when we
understand the social justification of belief, and thus have no need to
view it as accuracy of representation'. (15)

According to Rorty, the view of knowledge as accurate
representation is based on adopting the model of visual perception for
our relation to objects, and this contingent choice of metaphor results
in the 'wish to substitute confrontation [with that which compels
the mind to belief as soon as it is unveiled] for conversation as the
determinant of our belief'. (16) The implications of undoing this
thinking are widespread: 'if this way of thinking of knowledge is
optional, then so is epistemology, and so is philosophy, as it has
understood itself since the middle of the [nineteenth] century'.
(17)

Having turned away from a representationalist epistemology, Rorty
holds that when we have justified our knowledge through consensus there
is nothing more to be done. This he calls 'epistemological
behaviorism', reflecting an attitude he finds in Dewey and
Wittgenstein, which involves taking empirical human behaviour associated
with knowledge claims as the basis for those claims:

If assertions are justified by society rather than by the character
of the inner representations they express, then there is no point
in attempting to isolate privileged representations. Explaining
rationality and epistemic authority by reference to what society
lets us say, rather than the latter by the former, is the essence
of what I shall call 'epistemological behaviorism'. (18)

On this view, if we understand the rules of the epistemic language
game then we have understood all that there is to understand about why
such moves in that language game are made.

Rorty recognises that such a move might be criticised for begging
the question against ontological foundations that are rooted in an
objectively real world. He asks: 'Can we treat the study of
"the nature of human knowledge" just as the study of certain
ways in which human beings interact, or does it require an ontological
foundation?' Rorty's answer is that ontological connections
are not necessary because, understood from an epistemological
behaviorist viewpoint, a claim to knowledge such as 'David knows
that p' is simply a remark about the status of David's reports
among his peers and not about the relation between subject and object,
between nature and its mirror. This leads to a pragmatic view of truth
and to what Rorty calls a therapeutic approach to ontology that leaves
philosophy in the role of clarifying the conversation, but not of
'contribut[ing] any arguments of its own for the existence or
inexistence of something'. According to Rorty, the alternative to
this pragmatic behavioural epistemology is some sort of indefensible
ontological explanation that relates 'minds and meanings, minds and
immediate data of awareness, universals and particulars, thought and
language, consciousness and brains, and so on'. (19)

Rorty also responds to critics who hold that if the realism of
common sense is to be preserved then there must be an explanation that
will make truth more than 'what our peers will ... let us get away
with saying'. (20) He claims that such explanations usually try in
vain to bridge the gap between object and knowing subject. So, for
Rorty, the choice is between the pragmatic view of truth as 'what
it is good for us to believe' and an incoherent view of truth as
'contact with reality'. (21) To adopt a behaviorist view is to
'refuse to attempt a certain sort of explanation' which
interposes an acquaintance with meanings or with sensory appearances
between the impact of the environment on human beings and their reports
about it and then uses these explanations 'to explain the
reliability of such reports'. (22) According to Rorty, the hope of
a grounding in nature does not make sense; once we have understood from
a historical point of view when and why certain beliefs have been
adopted, there is nothing more concerning the so-called 'relation
of knowledge to reality' to explicate. (23) In explaining this
incoherent expectation, Rorty introduces an analogy with morality: just
as the pragmatist in morals cannot see what it would be like for moral
customs to be grounded, for example in human nature, so the
epistemological behaviorist cannot make sense of the question of
grounding epistemic claims in a correspondence with reality. So Rorty
describes his attitude to correspondence as that of Martin Heidegger,
and of Peter Strawson, who he quotes: 'The correspondence theory
requires, not purification, but elimination', (24) or, in his own
words, 'more mildly, it requires separation from epistemology and
relegation to semantics'. (25)

In his defence, Rorty recognises that for most people who think
that 'truth is correspondence to the way reality "really
is" ... this will look like an argument that there is no
truth'. (26) But he denies doing away with truth altogether.
'Nobody says there is no truth', (27) he says, rejecting
charges of relativism and of denuding 'true' and
'false' of their substantive senses, and even arguing that he
has an absolute conception of truth: 'Truth is, to be sure, an
absolute notion, in the following sense: "true for me but not for
you" and "true in my culture but not in yours" are weird,
pointless locutions'. (28) On the other hand, he says,
justification is relative to people and circumstances: 'phrases
like "the good in the way of belief" and "what it is
better for us to believe" are interchangeable with
"justified" rather than with "true"'. (29)
Nevertheless, despite this conceptual distinction between justification
and truth, we have, says Rorty, 'no criterion of truth other than
justification', and justification will always be relative to
audiences and ranges of truth candidates, just as goodness is relative
to purposes and rightness is relative to situations. So, he says,
'granted that "true" is an absolute term, its conditions
of application will always be relative', and despite the fact that
'there are many beliefs ... about which nobody with whom we bother
to argue has any doubt', no justification is ever sufficient to
remove all possible doubt. (30)

On one understanding, Rorty might sound like he is toeing a
fallibilist line which accepts that while truth is an absolute notion
consisting of correspondence to a 'non-description-relative,
intrinsic nature of reality', (31) nevertheless our knowledge of
that reality is always fallible, justified as it is within the
inevitable confines of human practices. Therefore, on this line of
thinking, the criterion of truth (justification) is relative but the
nature of truth would remain as correspondence to reality. But Rorty
denies that he can be interpreted this way: 'to get around this
argument, we followers of James and Nietzsche deny one of its premises:
namely, that truth is correspondence with reality'. (32) Rorty
insists that his understanding of truth is not a representationalist one
of truth as 'a word--world relation such as "fitting" or
"correspondence" or "accurate representation"',
but rather, is the semantic one elaborated by Tarski of describing how
'true' is used in a given language. (33) So he is dismissive
of the controversies concerning the correspondence theory of truth or a
possible successor theory, seeing such questions as 'leading
nowhere'. (34) And in the face of demands to produce an alternative
theory of truth, Rorty pays tribute to Donald Davidson, who 'helped
us realize that the very absoluteness of truth is a good reason for
thinking "true" indefinable and for thinking that no theory of
the nature of truth is possible'. (35)

Rorty also argues that truth is unserviceable as a goal of enquiry,
because its absoluteness means we can never know if we are nearer or
further from the truth. With justification as the only criterion, and
justification being relative to the purposes and lights of an audience,
the question of whether our justificatory practices lead to truth is
both unanswerable and unpragmatic: 'It is unanswerable because
there is no way to privilege our current purposes and interests. It is
unpragmatic because the answer to it would make no difference whatever
to our practice'. (36) Rorty responds to the challenge that,
'surely ... we know that we are closer to the truth', by
acknowledging a progress of sorts, but one which is relative to our
cultural expectations: 'we are much better able to serve the
purposes we wish to serve, and to cope with the situations we believe we
face, than our ancestors would have been'. (37) But, he says, we
can make no claims about our relationship to 'Truth' any more
than we can talk of getting closer to Beauty or Goodness or Rightness.
This nominalisation of adjectives implies a Platonic realm that we
approach with greater or lesser success but which fails to answer the
sceptical question of whether we are making progress in approaching
these absolutes. (38) It seems that epistemic failure is for Rorty a
reason for abandoning realism in science and morality.

Giving up the appearance--reality distinction, says Rorty, means
offering separate accounts of progress in science and in morality that
do not describe progress as somehow related to the intrinsic nature of
reality. With respect to science, Rorty's self-described
'leftwing Kuhnianism' enlists Thomas Kuhn in arguing that
progress is not to be understood as approaching truth, but rather, that
science progresses when it makes predictions and thereby 'enables
us ... to influence what will happen'. While critics might say that
science is able to make accurate predictions because it gets reality
right, Rorty calls this an incantation rather than an explanation for
predictive success, 'because we have no test for the explanans
distinct from our test for the explanandum ... it seems enough simply to
define scientific progress as an increased ability to make
predictions'. (39) So while Newton progressed over Aristotle, and
Einstein over Newton, 'neither came closer to the truth, or to the
intrinsic character of reality, than any of the others'. (40)

With respect to moral progress, Rorty claims:

Once one gives up on the idea that we have become less cruel and
treat each other better because we have more fully grasped the true
nature of human beings or of human rights or of human obligations
(more pseudo-explanations), it seems enough to define moral
progress as becoming like ourselves at our best (people who are not
racist, not aggressive, not intolerant, etc., etc.) (41)

The essence of morality, then, is to see differences of race or
gender or religion as irrelevant to cooperation for mutual benefit and
the need to alleviate suffering. So, characteristic of his unabashed
ethnocentricity, Rorty promotes a 'Western liberal picture of a
global democratic utopia [which] is that of a planet on which all
members of the species are concerned about the fates of all the other
members'. (42) And, although historically one society has
progressed over another in achieving this goal, 'none of these
societies was closer to the Demand of Morality'. (43) In fact the
suggestion that progress can be defined as a recognition of the
existence of human rights, for example, should be interpreted as:
'they conformed more closely to the way we wealthy, secure,
educated inhabitants of the First World think people should treat one
another'. (44) And, while such a view is quite justified, 'we
cannot check our view of the matter against the intrinsic nature of
moral reality'. (45) It is a pointless question to ask whether such
rights exist apart from human discourse, just as it is pointless to ask
about the existence of subatomic particles: 'human rights are no
more or less "objective" than quarks, but this is just to say
that reference to human rights is as indispensable to debates in the UN
Security Council as is reference to quarks in debates in the Royal
Society'. (46) The indispensability of this ascription of the
causal independence of rights or quarks from discourse is part of the
way we talk about them and should not be taken as an assertion about
their reality:

Anybody who doesn't know this fact about quarks is as unlikely to
grasp what they are as is somebody who thinks that human rights
were there before human beings. We can say, with Foucault, that
both human rights and homosexuality are recent social
constructions, but only if we say, with Bruno Latour, that quarks
are too. There is no point in saying that the former are 'just'
social constructions, for all the reasons that could be used to
back up this claim are reasons that would apply to quarks as well.
(47)

Having done away with the notion of the intrinsic nature of
reality, you also 'get rid of the notion that quarks and human
rights differ in "ontological status"', which in turn
removes natural science from its privileged epistemic position as a
paradigm for other discourses. (48)

RORTY'S PRAGMATIC AND PERFORMATIVE CONTRADICTIONS

What are we to make of this view of truth and knowledge that
detaches it from the real world in response to the difficulties of
proving what seems patently obvious to common sense? I offer five
criticisms of Rorty before finishing by briefly pointing to an
alternative way of tackling the intractable debates of philosophy--a way
that accepts the difficulties Rorty outlines but does not follow Rorty
to such counter-intuitive conclusions.

First, Rorty remains a closet Cartesian. I believe Rorty's
views are the outcome of his acceptance of a Cartesian view of knowledge
as indubitable belief, along with the recognition that it is impossible
to have a grasp of the world that isn't mediated by interpretive
and dubitable practices. Rorty says rightly, and perhaps tritely, that
'truth and knowledge can only be judged by the standards of the
inquirers of our own day'. And he goes on (in a way reminiscent of
Polanyi) to say, 'nothing counts as justification unless by
reference to what we already accept, and ... there is no way to get
outside our beliefs and our language so as to find some test other than
coherence'. (49) He also claims that nothing more can be said: talk
of ontology has no import and is perhaps unintelligible. In this, he
allows for no distinction to speak of between truth and what is believed
to be true. His conclusion is:

If we accept these criticisms, and therefore drop the notion of
epistemology as the quest, initiated by Descartes, for those
privileged items in the field of consciousness which are the
touchstones of truth, we are in a position to ask whether there
still remains something for epistemology to be. I want to urge that
there does not. (50)

At this point Rorty reveals his hand: he can conceive of no other
way to do epistemology. Frustrated with the failure of the Cartesian
project that would give sure answers to epistemic questions, Rorty
rightly recognises that the only viable criterion of truth is our
justificatory practices. But in so doing, rather than considering a
fallibilism that acknowledges an inevitable epistemic gap between
justification and truth, between what is justifiably believed to be true
and what is true, he says that this distinction is nonsensical,
preferring neither to talk of, nor to recognise, a way of discussing
what lies on the other side of the gap. (51) I suggest that this move
arises not from the logic of arguments about truth but from his
understandable desire to move on from intractable philosophical debates.
But it is the preference of one committed to a Cartesian epistemology,
who is weary of the 'increasingly tiresome pendulum swing'
between dogmatism and scepticism that arises 'as long as we try to
project from the relative and conditioned to the absolute and
unconditioned'. (52) For Rorty, the only way to stop the pendulum
is through the cultural change of reforming what is taken to be common
sense. So rather than involve himself further in the quagmire of
epistemology, his goal is to bring about 'changes in the intuitions
available for being pumped up by philosophical arguments'. (53)

Second, Rorty tangles himself in Jurgen Habermas's
'performative contradiction'. Although he claims to be working
within culture and language, and not to be drawing on notions of
reality, Rorty must make use of concepts such as truth and reality while
at the same time denying them. (54) He incorporates notions of 'how
things really are' in his discussion and he makes truth claims that
assume an extra-human reality while at the same time denying that
possibility. (55) Likewise when he uses phrases such as coping
'with the situations we believe we face', (56) he assumes an
appearance-reality distinction by contrasting our beliefs, which might
be wrong, with a situation that we actually face despite our belief that
it is otherwise. When he says, 'we have no criterion of truth other
than justification', (57) he uses truth in a substantive sense; he
does not mean we have no criterion for defining the word
'truth', but rather, that we have no means of access to truth
except through our justificatory processes. This is clear when he says
in the same context that phrases such as '"good in the way of
belief" are interchangeable with "justified" but not with
"true"'. (58) But if 'criterion' means
something like a means of access then Rorty implicitly recognises truth
as distinct from justification and as inaccessible. By holding that
'truth' has no use, he elides truth with our beliefs about the
world instead of making the fiduciary leap that says, for example,
'I know that my beliefs may be false, but I nevertheless believe
that the claim of science that "climate change is
human-induced" is a true proposition about the world in
itself'. In short, as one critic says: 'in the very act of
renouncing "metaphysical" philosophy, and general theories of
"the way things really are" ... Rorty presents an alternative
ontological picture and general theory of "the way things really
are"'. (59)

Third, Rorty's views fail on pragmatic grounds. There are a
number of ways in which his position fails the pragmatic test of
usefulness because it does not recognise that convictions about
objective truth do 'make a (useful) difference'. For example,
the power of human rights discourse lies in a belief, opaque as it is,
that human rights really exist and are more than a Western liberal
language game or useful fiction. Rorty is right that rational argument
is not sufficient, but rhetorical persuasion too depends on its ringing
true. Rorty says, 'we understand knowledge when we understand the
social justification of belief', (60) but an essential part of the
social justification and persuasive power of knowledge claims lies in
their being believed to be true in virtue of some sort of correspondence
with reality. Rorty's unmasking of knowledge also strips his
'consensual knowledge' of its power to persuade. While
philosophically this might be an acceptable outcome, it cannot be so for
a pragmatist with utopian dreams of promoting the conversation of
humankind. Knowledge without truth is not pragmatic. Associated with the
unpragmatic nature of Rorty's proposals is the importance he places
on common cultural values: 'What binds societies together are
common vocabularies and common hopes'. (61) But there are many who
would disagree, for example, with his egalitarianism. At one end of the
spectrum some not-so-liberals would argue that race, gender or religion
do in fact make for moral distinctions, while at the other end some
would charge Rorty with speciesism for leaving non-human animals out of
his egalitarian picture. Rorty's response no doubt would be to make
his view attractive through rhetoric and imagination, but having lost
the persuasive power of truth claims, the pragmatic virtues of his
proposal seem dubitable.

Fourth, Rorty's description of progress in science and in
morality reveals that he has substituted one set of criteria for
progress ('approaching truth') for another that is just as
difficult to define and which is subject to the same sorts of 'not
knowing what that would mean' arguments that he uses against the
idea of 'the world in itself'. Rorty's 'the best we
can be' makes his utopia as hard to define as any other moral
vision, and in Rortian style I suggest that his ideal of 'our
best' is an incantation, a pseudo-explanation appealing to
indefinable cultural intuitions. Predictive success in science and
'our best' in morality are both obscure terms susceptible to
the same sorts of critique that Rorty was keen to leave behind by not
talking of truth as correspondence. Inevitably, truth re-enters the
scene along with fallibility. In science we ask if this theory is better
at predictions than another, or if this experimental result is or is not
what was predicted. In response to such questions we offer a
justifactory story when we argue with those who say that the result we
invoke is not in fact an example of a successful prediction. Meanwhile
in moral matters, Rorty only moves the discussion from one of whether,
for example, 'universal human rights' exist, to one of whether
in fact humans at their best are not racist.

Fifth, faced with the impossibility of fulfilling the dream of
offering certain grounds for knowledge rooted in an objective external
reality, Rorty ironically continues the search for apodictic truth by
redefining truth and knowledge so that they are grounded in
intersubjective justificatory practices. Knowledge remains
'justified true belief', but 'true' becomes
redundant. Rorty's new 'truth' is now self-evident, the
incontestable outcome of human knowledge practices. While he is right
that we cannot discuss the world without the language of beliefs, this
does not mean that conceptually we do not draw the distinction between
truth and belief or find the distinction essential in making sense of
the language of belief. In an act of philosophical self harm, Rorty cuts
off his nose and refuses to continue the conversation: if he can't
have the assured truth that the Cartesian project has sought, he
won't have objective truth at all. Instead, in his search for
assurance rooted in Cartesian insecurities, he chooses to redefine
truth. The possibility that Rorty does not consider is that of accepting
our intuitions about some sort of correspondence between beliefs and the
world, and allowing that while we find that correspondence difficult to
characterise, it is still our only way of making rational or pragmatic
sense of that world.

Now is not the time to argue further with Rorty. Rather, I want to
point to another way of approaching human knowledge that might offer
solutions to the enduring problem with foundational and other
epistemologies, while also allowing us to hold on to our fundamental
intuitions that make the human conversation possible.

FIDUCIARY HERMENEUTIC FALLIBILISM

In the space of three years in the mid-twentieth century, two of
the most significant critiques of the Enlightenment dream of
guaranteeing knowledge through methodological rigour were published. In
1958 Michael Polanyi's Personal Knowledge (62) presaged the work of
Thomas Kuhn in its analysis of the social and intangible factors in
scientific knowledge production. (63) In i960 Hans-Georg Gadamer
published Truth and Method, (64) the seminal work in philosophical
hermeneutics. In the sense that both of these authors reject the
possibility of an Archimedean standpoint, which is unmediated by
tradition and unaffected by personal beliefs, they, like Rorty, cast
aside Cartesian epistemic pretensions. But both also stand against
relativism and subjectivism by holding that, while certainty is a
chimera, we nevertheless can make universal truth claims. While they use
different language, there is a marked correspondence in the way Gadamer
and Polanyi describe what we might cautiously call the epistemic
products of hermeneutics and of the natural sciences respectively. Both
authors recognise the two poles of interpreter and meaning, but reject
the inadequate descriptions implied by either subjectivism or a naive
objectivism that assumes unmediated access to reality. For Gadamer, true
understanding is not subjective, but nor can it ever be final. It is not
merely subjective, because it is in some sense true: 'Meanings
cannot be understood in an arbitrary way', he claims. And he talks
of the danger of failing 'to hear what the other person is really
saying', or of 'ignoring as consistently and stubbornly as
possible the actual meaning of the text'. 'The important
thing', he says, 'is to be aware of one's own bias, so
that the text can present itself in all its otherness and thus assert
its own truth against one's own fore-meanings'. (65) Now
consider Polanyi:

Comprehension is neither an arbitrary act nor a passive experience,
but a responsible act claiming universal validity. Such knowing is
indeed objective in the sense of establishing contact with a hidden
reality ... By trying to say something that is true about a reality
believed to be existing independently of our knowing it, all
assertions of fact necessarily carry universal intent. Our claim to
speak of reality serves thus as the external anchoring of our
commitment in making a factual statement. (66)

For these authors, knowledge is provisional, both in the sense that
it is always in the making and in the sense that the interpreter may
simply be wrong. Whether we think of Newton and Einstein or Romeo and
Juliet, some interpretations are better than others. But conviction, not
certainty, is the appropriate descriptor of beliefs that are no longer
seen to lie at the extremes of the spectrum between certainty and
uncertainty.

While neither Gadamer nor Polanyi are against method, they both
elaborate their theories in conscious opposition to an Enlightenment
confidence in method as a guarantee of truth. They recognise the
inevitably partial nature of human exploration of truth, and both
display an epistemic humility that challenges naive Enlightenment
optimism and mastery, which in its positivist extremes claims that all
that cannot be mastered is meaningless. Polanyi highlights the
impossibility of formalising the rules of scientific discovery, and
emphasises the personal agency, commitment and creativity of the
scientist. For example:

Desisting henceforth from the vain pursuit of a formalized
scientific method, commitment accepts in its place the person of
the scientist as the agent responsible for conducting and
accrediting scientific discoveries. The scientist's procedure is of
course methodical. But his methods are but the maxims of an art
which he applies in his own original way to the problem of his own
choice. (67)

For his part, while Gadamer is happy to talk loosely of procedure
('a procedure that we in fact exercise whenever we understand
anything' (68)) and of 'methodologically conscious
understanding', (69) like Polanyi he is firmly against trusting in
method to lead to truth. Gadamer refers to the task of hermeneutics in
the following way:

Ultimately, it has always been known that the possibilities of
rational proof and instruction do not fully exhaust the sphere of
knowledge ... [We] must laboriously make our way back into this
tradition by first showing the difficulties that result from the
application of the modern concept of method to the human sciences.
(70)

So, like Rorty, both Gadamer and Polanyi see themselves as
attempting to escape from what Gadamer calls 'entanglement in
traditional epistemology'. (71) But unlike Rorty, Gadamer and
Polanyi hold on to the baby of truth as they throw out the bath water of
the Cartesian hope for sure knowledge. Faced with the false dilemma of
opting out of realist epistemology as Rorty does, or of entering the
regressive cycle of fighting the phantoms of pre-critical belief, they
choose neither, instead embracing prejudgements as allies to be coopted
in the search for truth. So they develop more nuanced descriptions of
the practice of human understanding or knowledge production and they do
so by focusing on an articulation of a knowledge that is neither
guaranteed nor final. They, like Rorty, highlight not only the
inevitability but also the necessity of all thinking being entrenched in
history, tradition and prejudgements. For Polanyi the purpose is
'to achieve a frame of mind in which I may hold firmly to what I
believe to be true, even though I know that it might conceivably be
false', (72) and 'to enter avenues of legitimate access to
reality from which [extreme] objectivism debars us'. (73) For
Gadamer, who claims that the essence and downfall of Enlightenment
epistemology was its prejudice against prejudice, (74) the
'fundamental epistemological question' (75) concerns the
indispensability and legitimate contributions of mostly unconscious
prejudices, or prejudgements--the word is the same in German. So,
Gadamer's hermeneutics is based on the doctrine that prejudgements
are a condition for understanding. In an oft-quoted passage, he says:

Long before we understand ourselves through the process of
self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in
the family, society, and state in which we live ... The
self-awareness of the individual is only a flickering in the closed
circuits of historical life. That is why the prejudgments of the
individual, far more than his judgments, constitute the historical
reality of his being. (76)

Polanyi, too, is in no doubt about the naivety of a program of
Cartesian doubt that aims to eliminate preconceived opinions:
'While we can reduce the sum of our conscious acceptances to
varying degrees, and even to nil, by reducing ourselves to a state of
stupor, any given range of awareness seems to involve a correspondingly
extensive set of acritically accepted beliefs.' (77) While
Gadamer's discussion is in terms of the role of prejudice and
tradition, the conceptual link with Polanyi becomes clearer when Gadamer
talks of the sort of authority that can be a valid source of truth:

Authority cannot actually be bestowed but is earned ... It rests on
acknowledgment and hence on an act of reason itself which, aware of
its own limitations, trusts to the better insight of others. ...
The prejudgments that [the teacher, the superior, the expert]
implant are legitimized by the person who presents them. But in
this way they become prejudgments not just in favor of a person but
a content, since they effect the same disposition to believe
something that can be brought about in other ways--e.g. by good
reasons. (78)

Now listen to Polanyi talking about authority and tradition in
science:

The knowledge comprised by science is not known to any single
person. Indeed, nobody knows more than a tiny fragment of science
well enough to judge its validity and value at first hand. For the
rest he has to rely on views accepted at second hand on the
authority of a community of people accredited as scientists. (79)

One implication of the necessity of working from acritically
accepted beliefs is the commitment implicit in holding such beliefs.
Gadamer recognises 'the "scientific" integrity of
acknowledging the commitment involved in all understanding', (80)
but it is Polanyi, challenging the image of the neutrality of the
scientist, who highlights the personal involvement and commitment of the
knower or interpreter. He talks of the 'fiduciary rootedness of all
rationality' (81) and says that 'the attribution of truth to
any particular, stable [view of the universe] is a fiduciary act which
cannot be analysed in non-committal terms'. (82) For him, 'the
act of knowing includes an appraisal; and this personal coefficient,
which shapes all factual knowledge, bridges in doing so the disjunction
between subjectivity and objectivity'. (83) So, the scientist makes
a personal decision, yet not arbitrarily, about what to believe:

He arrived at his conclusions by the utmost exercise of
responsibility. He has reached responsible beliefs, born of
necessity, and not changeable at will ... To accept commitment as
the only relation in which we can believe something to be true is
to abandon all efforts to find strict criteria of truth and strict
procedures for arriving at the truth. (84)

CONCLUSION

In these brief allusions to the work of Polanyi and Gadamer, I hope
to have indicated why abandoning 'efforts to find strict criteria
of truth' may not entail abandoning a realist view of truth.
Richard Rorty's pragmatic proposal for the conversation of
humankind lacks warrant for accepting his liberal ironist way forward,
while fiduciary hermeneutic fallibilism based on thinkers such as
Polanyi and Gadamer finds common ground with some of Rorty's
assessment of the problems of traditional epistemology, but without
accepting his conclusions. It offers an alternative that makes it
possible to hold onto robust realism, in both science and morality,
while at the same time recognising the contingency of our circumstances,
and that we might conceivably be wrong.

There is also an appalling third way forward that debunks realist
pretensions as Rorty does, but which submits to no moral norms: a
Nietzschean and Darwinian existence where persuasion gives way to
raw power and survival of the fittest. While this third way, like
the other two, is also home-grown in the West, it will not be the
West that has the option of exercising such hegemony, as it cedes
to the powerful nation-states of the future--those which have not
drawn from the wells that gave us Western science, human rights and
charity for the outcast and stranger. This threatening possibility,
rooted not in xenophobia but in the realities of significant
cultural differences, looms in the background, as reward for the
failure of the conversation of humankind.

The global community does not need to agree on the exact
ontological nature or source of morality, any more than it needs to
agree on the precise consequences of profligate carbon consumption, in
order to believe that climate change is anthropogenic and that universal
human rights exist. While the realist believes that our obligation is
rooted in the nature of humanity and the universe, the pragmatist too is
bound for pragmatic reasons to accept the moral and scientific realism
that is necessary to ground the human conversation.

ENDNOTES

(1) I wish to thank Cambridge Scholars Publishing for permission to
use edited extracts from Chris Mulherin, 'A rose by any other name?
Personal knowledge and hermeneutics', in Tihamer Margitay (ed.),
Knowing and Being, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne,
2010. Thanks are also due to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful
comments and to my supervisor Rev. Dr Shane Mackinlay who with the help
of Kate (Turabian) keeps me on the straight and narrow.

(51) Michael Williams suggests Rorty's ironism is scepticism
under another name and that Rorty fails to keep the distinction between
fallibilism and scepticism clear. See Michael Williams, 'Rorty on
knowledge and truth', in CB Guignon and DR Hiley (eds), Richard
Rorty, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003, 61-80.

(55) Rorty acknowledges this criticism levelled at him by Habermas
and Apel for example when he says, 'My own view is that we do not
need, either in epistemology or in moral philosophy, the notion of
universal validity. I argue for this in 'Sind Aussagen Universelle
Geltungsanspruche?' in Deutsche Zeitschrift fur Philosophie vol.
42, no. 6, 1994, 975-88. Habermas and Apel find my view paradoxical and
likely to produce performative self-contradiction'. See Rorty,
'Justice as a larger loyalty', Ethical Perspectives, vol.4,
no.2, 1997, 139-51.

(56) Rorty, Truth and Progress, 4.

(57) Rorty, Truth and Progress, 2.

(58) Rorty, Truth and Progress, 2.

(59) Nigel Pleasants, Wittgenstein and the Idea of a Critical
Social Theory: A Critique of Giddens, Habermas and Bhaskar, Routledge,
London, 1999, 20-1.

(63) There is some discussion as to how much Kuhn's Structure
of Scientific Revolutions owes to Polanyi's work published four
years earlier. See especially Jacobs, 'Michael Polanyi and Thomas
Kuhn: Priority and credit', Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi
Society Periodical, vol.33, no.2, 2007, 25-35, and Martin X Moleski,
'Polanyi vs. Kuhn: Worldviews apart', Tradition and Discovery:
The Polanyi Society Periodical, vol.33, no.2, 2007, 8-24.